Top 400 Jonathan Swift Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.”

— Jonathan Swift

52. “Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.”

— Jonathan Swift

53. “If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.”

— Jonathan Swift

54. “A chuck under the chin is worth two kisses.”

— Jonathan Swift

55. “Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.”

— Jonathan Swift

56. “Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.”

— Jonathan Swift

57. “If you were not reasoned into your beliefs, you cannot be reasoned out of them.”

— Jonathan Swift

58. “When a man of genius appears in the world, it is immediately recognized by the fact that all the blockheads join forces against him.”

— Jonathan Swift

59. “I’m as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.”

— Jonathan Swift

60. “We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.”

— Jonathan Swift

61. “Live every day as your last, because one of these days, it will be.”

— Jonathan Swift

62. “It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”

— Jonathan Swift

63. “The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver’s watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.”

— Jonathan Swift

64. “For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”

— Jonathan Swift

65. “Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.”

— Jonathan Swift

66. “Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics.”

— Jonathan Swift

67. “For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.”

— Jonathan Swift

68. “Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies.”

— Jonathan Swift

69. “Argument is the worst sort of conversation.”

— Jonathan Swift

70. “I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.”

— Jonathan Swift

71. “For, what though his Head be empty, provided his Common place-Book be full...”

— Jonathan Swift

72. “The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.”

— Jonathan Swift

73. “Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.”

— Jonathan Swift

74. “This Day, whate’er the Fates decree; Shall still be kept with Joy by me: This Day then, let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old.”

— Jonathan Swift

75. “Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.”

— Jonathan Swift

76. “Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.”

— Jonathan Swift

77. “Bachelor’s fare: bread and cheese, and kisses.”

— Jonathan Swift

78. “Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character.”

— Jonathan Swift

79. “Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”

— Jonathan Swift

80. “Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.”

— Jonathan Swift

81. “Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.”

— Jonathan Swift

82. “Come, agree, the law’s costly.”

— Jonathan Swift

83. “I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite.”

— Jonathan Swift

84. “Walls have tongues, and hedges ears.”

— Jonathan Swift

85. “It is remarkable with what Christian fortitude and resignation we can bear the suffering of other folks.”

— Jonathan Swift

86. “The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.”

— Jonathan Swift

87. “I won’t quarrel with my bread and butter.”

— Jonathan Swift

88. “The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.”

— Jonathan Swift

89. “I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.”

— Jonathan Swift

90. “When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.”

— Jonathan Swift

91. “There is no vice which humankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.”

— Jonathan Swift

92. “Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !”

— Jonathan Swift

93. “A carpenter is known by his chips.”

— Jonathan Swift

94. “Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.”

— Jonathan Swift

95. “Many a truth is told in jest.”

— Jonathan Swift

96. “For poetry, he’s past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme; His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I’d have him throw away his pen, But there’s no talking to some men.”

— Jonathan Swift

97. “Pedantry is properly the over-rating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.”

— Jonathan Swift

98. “It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.”

— Jonathan Swift

99. “Books, the children of the brain.”

— Jonathan Swift

100. “A pleasant companion is as good as a coach.”

— Jonathan Swift